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Short story category: 5 Minutes

The man loves his three hats. His wife, she doesn’t love them; to her they are just a chore. They lie wherever he leaves them, and she must pick them up, put them back where they belong. Again, and again. Over the decades, she must have picked up those hats hundreds of times. Thousands. But the

It was the middle of August when she realised. Night was falling, hiding the world beneath its inky veil. The windowpanes glowed yellow, the light spilling out and illuminating the garden table where they sat. The drum of music floated on the balmy air. The bushes hummed with invisible life. She

My father liked setting the clock an hour fast so he could enjoy the fact it was really only 6.00am and not 7.00am which meant he could have an extra hour’s sleep each morning before he got up for work. In addition, the clock gained five minutes every day, so when I needed to catch a bus from my h

He must have received the letter on Tuesday – perhaps Wednesday, but most likely Tuesday. He wouldn’t have gone down to collect the post immediately; he would have seen the postman arrive from the upstairs study window, registered an arrival of correspondence, but continued at his desk, the same

Sally locked the door hastily and darted into the alley flanking her gift shop. Because there she was again. Her new neighbour. What was she doing, wafting about the village at five o’clock on a rainy evening in February? Almost certainly yet another import from London, newly-ensconced in what sho

'Why don’t you paint me?’ she asked. ‘I don’t paint anyone,’ I replied. ‘Actually, I don’t paint at all.’ ‘But you could,’ she remarked. ‘In theory, I suppose. But I’m not any good.’ ‘Do you have to be good?’ she asked. ‘In order to paint someone.’ â€

Getting my son to school, the comedy of errors begins. Because the locking mechanism on my Subaru has frozen, the rear door won’t open unless I do it from the outside. I pull the parking brake, step out and find myself spread eagled on a sheath of black ice. Whenever I turn off the radio, the door

The snow began as I was driving home from Sunday dinner with Maria and her family. Really Christmas, I thought, and felt comforted. Maria’s family had welcomed me as an honoured guest. Probably, I’d thought, the first foreigner ever to enter their home. Certainly the first welcome foreigner.